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Quantifying The Brand (8/9/00)
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When quantifying corporate assets, you can talk about quarterly revenues, gross margins, inventory levels, cash on hand, market capitalization, and a slew of other financial-type numbers that generally sends people like us to sleep faster than C-SPAN's sixteen-hour blockbuster "American-Croatian Relations Marathon." But beyond the numbers, you get into the realm of intangibles-- the touchy-feely stuff that doesn't show up on the quarterly balance sheet. In Apple's case, for instance, there's the Steve Factor. If Steve were to walk tomorrow, Apple would take a huge hit... but if the company were to find a replacement willing to work for a dollar a year (plus the occasional jet), the numbers wouldn't necessarily register the vast, Steve-sized hole in Apple's corporate armor. Until the stock started to tank, that is.
Similarly, consider Apple's brand. That little monochromatic formerly-rainbow-colored logo is one of the most recognizable symbols in the industrialized world. Furthermore, Apple's managed to cultivate a feeling to attach to the logo and brand-- one of creativity, of fun, of thinking differently. It's probably the third-most-popular aftermarket symbol affixed to motor vehicles after the Jesus fish and a "Calvin and Hobbes" character urinating on the Ford logo. Well, okay, maybe not-- but it's still one darn popular little symbol. And you just can't put a price tag on that kind of brand recognition.
Or can you? According to Macworld UK, a company called Interbrand has done just that, calculating "brand values" for its "World's Most Valuable Brands Survey." Reportedly these guys assign a value to a brand as a function of the company's "market capitalization, revenues and other performance measurements." That doesn't sound like a great way to quantify the worth of Apple's brand to us, but maybe we shouldn't complain: Apple apparently pulled the "highest percentage change in value for any brand in the computer industry from 1999 to 2000," jumping from 4,283,000 to 6,594,000. Apple's brand currently ranks 36th overall, and 11th in just the tech division. While we have no idea what that means, it sure sounds impressive, doesn't it?
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SceneLink (2472)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 8/9/00 episode: August 9, 2000: The 1200 MHz Xtrem Mac just won't go away; why are the people behind it spending cold hard cash on expensive press releases? Meanwhile, rumor has it that the Mac OS X public beta, officially due in September, may not ship until September, and Apple's brand leaps in value, according to some company called Interbrand...
Other scenes from that episode: 2470: When The Chips Are Down (8/9/00) It refuses to die, and frankly, we should have seen it coming. Anyone who lived through the COS fracas of 1997 should have recognized all the earmarks of a Hoax With Legs. You may recall that the COS scam-- the alleged $99 "alternative Mac OS" that claimed full compatibility with existing applications, quadruple the speed of Apple's operating system, full memory protection, multiprocessor support, and a raft of other features, all crammed into 12 MB on disk and a 4 MB RAM partition-- persisted beyond all reasonable lengths of time for one reason and one reason alone: it exploited the platform's need for a modern Mac OS back when Rhapsody (er, we mean Mac OS X) was still years away... 2471: "You Want It WHEN?" (8/9/00) We'd be the first to admit that Mac OS Rumors is not what it once was. Few would argue that it's long been supplanted as "the" Mac rumors site by AppleInsider, which, despite being updated less frequently, generally seems to have far more reliable information...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
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